The School for Industrial Engineering has several research focus areas, namely:
- Health Systems Engineering – Health systems engineering focuses on using engineering tools and techniques to improve healthcare systems. The specific focus of the group is currently to apply operational research and management sciences to complex healthcare problems.
- Industrial Engineering in Agriculture – The group's purpose is to use proven industrial engineering techniques and applied research to improve agricultural processes, thereby making companies and farms more effective, efficient, and profitable.
- Operational Excellence – This research field involves the use of research to explore and understand the complexities associated with processes and attitude improvements in operational environments. It also utilises improvement theories in these environments.
- Operations Research and Data Analytics – Operations research (OR) focuses on the creation of mathematical models to represent and solve real-world problems as close to optimally as possible. In this field, we make use of engineering tools like exact and heuristic algorithms (for example the branch-and-bound and genetic algorithms), as well as data analytics/machine learning modelling using clustering and predictive supervised and unsupervised modelling. We focus on solving practical real-world problems in areas like image recognition, natural language processing, logistics, finance, and mining. We also have a special interest group focusing on OR in healthcare applications.
- Renewable Energy – The Renewable Energy research group in industrial engineering at the NWU enables a sustainable future for Africa through world-class renewable and bio-energy research, advisory services, training programmes and awareness campaigns. The Renewable Energy research group aims to make the world a better place by working collaboratively with businesses and professionals to help deploy sustainable supply chains, technical know-how, and business strategy advice needed to produce renewable energy that will benefit everyone.
- Technology, Innovation and Society – The Technology, Innovation and Society group aims to leverage industrial engineering knowledge in the use of new and innovative technologies to improve the functionality of society at large. Furthermore, the group extensively researches the use of Industry 4.0 technologies and technology adoption/adaption in South Africa to help bridge the gap in the development of Third World nations.